Status Updates From Enactivist Interventions: R...

“Pragmatically considered, concepts or thoughts can be regarded as nothing other than affordances that offer (or solicit us to) possibilities to follow one path or another as we engage in thinking.”

But then we could say: the mechanistic account is unjustifiably representational! What does it mean for my identification of the lizard to “interact” with a “representation of my lizard collection”, “causing” a desire to catch it? This is just a mechanistic way of putting the phenomenological account of the experience (this reminded me of my lizard collection, so I…). What to do?

But the main argument is that, if I plan to do x, then I’m going to do y, z…, and this may take time. And the capacity to engage in such long projects, planning, deliberation, all that is free will. But I’m not convinced: we’re just taking a bigger timescale, but it’s not obvious it’s not just lots of mechanistic connections.

But maybe the state in my brain of recognizing the lizard interacts with a representation of my collection, causing a conative state of wanting to catch that lizard. Nothing about this seems to square with a game of rational justification or sPaCE OF rEaSOns

I am puzzled by the case for free will: I see something move in the grass, make a reflex jump, identify the thing as a harmless lizard, decide to catch it for my collection, and reach for it. SG says each action is initiated by motor activations beyond my conscious will, but the succession itself, which actions it involves, exhibits free will.

More basically still: if intentionality is ascription-dependent and linguistic, how come do animals and infants have it? What about the fact we attribute intentionality even to squares chased by triangles in short animated films?

Thought on Brandom: once you’ve said we interpret “intentional” (linguistic) behaviour in the light of social practices, you haven’t said anything: how is the interpretation supposed to go? Following generalized rules diversely encoded in language (Levinson), or one-off specifically cognitive heuristics (Relevance theory), or something else?

“Enactivists argue against the functionalism of extended mind theorists who discount any special role of the living body in cognition, given that one may be able to substitute prosthetic parts to take over or augment bodily functions.”

You don’t have activity in premotor areas for motor verbs; does that mean neural activation patterns don’t track verb use in general (weird), or that they don’t differentiate semantically between the different body-related features of such and such action verbs in association to the neural areas that activate when such and such action is performed? The latter it would seem: semantic-motor link is general